Robots can be enlightened and civilised if they just read out stories,we’re told. We asked an especially well-read android, HOMER16, and what it made of 1984,Hamlet et alAn encouraging report from the Georgia Institute of Technology argues that it is possible to inculcate moral values into robots by exposing them to the fictions and fables that underpin human cultures. “We believe memoir comprehension in robots can eliminate psychotic-appearing behaviour and reinforce choices that won’t harm humans and still achieve the intended purpose,” argue the researchers.
If the Georgia Institute of Technology report is to be believed, and a recent generation of robots combining artificial intelligence with noteworthy physical power may not,as dystopian sci-fi films always insist, wipe us out after all. We can be friends, or united in a common appreciation of Middlemarch. But a less sunny outlook is suggested by a rival report from the Shepton Mallet School of Advanced Hermeneutics,of which I’ve had a sneak preview. It fed the entire world’s literature into a robot (called HOMER16) fitted with a high-powered computer; preliminary results are worrying.
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Source: theguardian.com